


Chasing The Starlight

by nothing_rhymes_with_ianto



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-27
Updated: 2012-09-27
Packaged: 2017-11-15 04:19:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto/pseuds/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack looks out on the lights of the city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chasing The Starlight

It’s nights like these that Jack misses the stars. Nights when too much has happened before and nothing his happening now and he can’t keep from thinking. So he puts on Glenn Miller as loud as he can get it and tries not to think of deaths or mistakes or decisions. But it doesn’t work, because it never works. So he switches off the music and hurries out of the clammy cold space of the Hub and into the newly oxygenized outside.

He runs across the city—runs, doesn’t walk, because there’s too much nervous energy in him— and climbs to the top of the highest building in Cardiff. From its roof he can see the whole city below him. The city he protects, the city he stays in because he’s too caught up in the past and can’t look far enough into the future for fear of seeing himself out there, still going on, alone, tired, empty.

From the roof the city sparkles, it looks beautiful. He cannot see the dark creepers of evil and hurt from up here. He cannot pinpoint the building where Owen died, or the place where John and pushed him to his death, or the little house with the girl who was turned to a fairy. They have all been pressed together and lighted in a little illusion of twinkling peace.

Sometimes Jack looks across the glittering city and sees galaxies. The lights look like star clusters, shining and colourful, floating in the black. He lets his eyes go unfocussed and pretends he’s staring out of his spaceship at the Universe stretched in front of him. It’s beautiful, it’s nostalgic. It isn’t real. It’s too real. It makes him want to cry.

Sometimes, he jumps off of the tallest building in Cardiff, and for the first few moments of his free fall, he keeps his eyes open, watching the city light-beams shine, and pretends he’s leaping out into space, flying through the stars.


End file.
